Peter Costa: Mailbox damage tests crime and punishment

Vandals tore down my mailbox a few nights ago. Had the box been filled, they might have been doing me a favor. But it was empty.

Peter Costa

Vandals tore down my mailbox a few nights ago. Had the box been filled, they might have been doing me a favor. But it was empty.

During the day, my mailbox is an asteroid belt of bills and junk mail. It sports a collection of catalogs targeted to seniors who need safety bars to get in and out of their bathtubs. There are also pages of those neat plastic gadgets that make opening a pickle jar less of an Olympic event.

Let’s get back to the crime. Why these young Visigoths damaged the mailboxes in my neighborhood is beyond me. Maybe they thought the mailbox posts were tackling dummies daring them to channel the rivers of testosterone coursing through their hyperactive teenage systems. Perhaps they got rejected from their “stretch” schools and are now forced to go to colleges in-state. Or maybe it was just plain fun, a practical joke on the homeowner who is inside watching “Dog, Bounty Hunter.”

I presume the vandalism was committed by a group of young boys. It is hard to imagine, for example, a retired woman walking down the street who is pulling down the boxes – unless it was a disgruntled postal worker going postal. More likely, it was a gang of three or four middle-school boys out for kicks.

In my mind’s eye, I see them on foot, walking cockily down the lanes, laughing and making noises that would scare off wild boars. They are, as my grandmother used to say, too big for their britches.

My neighbor called the police after the incident. The police department dispatched an officer in a black-and-white who took down a very detailed police report.

I thought of ways to catch these kids in the act. I could pull recon in my unlit garage and zoom out with my digital camera and take their pictures just as they beheaded my mailbox. I could deploy my lawn sprinkler close to the mailbox and shower them when they came too close.

I thought of more aggressive measures. I have a fishing lure that features three ganged fishhooks to ensnare large-mouth bass. I could cast this at the boys and possibly hook one of them in the shirt. With my luck, however, I would probably catch them in an unprotected place and find myself doing 5 to 10 at Joliet for using excessive force – despite the provisions of the controversial Stand Your Ground Law.

These steps would doubtlessly be too draconian. After all, it is only a mailbox. I’ll try to remember that the next time it rains and my mail gets wet because the lid was twisted in the vandalism.

Just think of all those soggy catalogs.

Peter Costa is a columnist for GateHouse Media. His latest collection of humor columns, “Outrageous CostaLiving,” is available at amazon.com

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